Monday | April 19, 2004 7:00 pm

Stalker

Screening on Film

Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky.
With Aleksandr Kaidanovsky, Anatoly Solonitsyn.
USSR, 1979, 35mm, color, 161 min.
Russian with English subtitles.

Conceived in an epic form, Tarkovsky’s film represents the peak of the Russian director’s cinematic career, exemplifying what he called a “poetic, philosophical, and spiritual cinema.” Two disenchanted intellectuals wish to explore the Zone, a mysterious region at the center of which a room, said to offer knowledge of one’s most secret desires, is located. The men hire a stalker for their guide, whose obsession with the Zone takes on religious and mystical overtones.